I was recently having and issue where Brave would seemingly reset on my laptop, log me out of everything and disconnect me from my sync chain. None of my autofill was populating and every webpage I regularly visit was logged out.
When I would attempt to get my sync code from my desktop and re-enter it into my laptop I would receive and error that stated “Internal Sync Setup Error”. The only solution I found at first was to use Revo Uninstaller, completely remove Brave, delete my sync chain, and recreate the chain on my desktop and sync it to my laptop.
After multiple instances of this occurring and doing the above, I found the common denominator - Brave “reset” after a Windows Update was installed and computer restarted. I noticed on the first startup after updates my OneDrive app was requesting that I log back in, and Brave was logged out of all my regular sites as well. After some digging it seemed like it must be related to Windows Credential Manager and how it was acting after an update.
After completing this, I went back into Brave - went to a website and boom my autofill data was populating. I then grabbed my sync code from my desktop and added it to my laptop, the sync chain reconnected.
Credential Manager being set to manual - instead of automatic seemed to be the culprit. I have yet to install any additional Windows updates to see if this is my long-awaited solution - but the fact that I did not have to uninstall Brave on my laptop and create a new sync chain for everything to work again seems to be a good sign.
After struggling with this for months and blaming it on Brave’s sync service I hope this can help someone else out.
So ultimately someone (this should be Google lol) needs to find out why that it being set to Manual, the Windows default (as my host is also manual and never has this problem), is causing issues for some users, when it actually shouldn’t be set to Automatic per Microsoft. (It’s still ultimately a Chromium problem, as Edge is affected too, along with Google Chrome upon research).
EDIT: Ok so setting this to Automatic leaves VaultSvc in RAM at boot, this is not a good idea because it leaves sensitive data possibly in RAM (possibly, this is why since Windows 7 this became a “Manual” service). It should be called upon, and a program wait, and then continue. Chromium appears actually to be expecting it to just be there and answer immediately and if it doesn’t, it fails. So it’s the timing, Chromium just isn’t waiting like it should.
Yeah. Failure to wait. ← So a “jump to conclusion” kicks in, and Brave Browser (Chromium) falls back to “get there -itis” → attempting to create a restored Profile from journals. (Something like that.) Is my guess.
So, the remaining work of an update, lurks. A sync, a hibernation/sleep, a “just walked away from my computer for a while”, an “I started up my computer in the morning” . . . all are timing issue vulnerabilities.
The lurking update (or remains thereof) jumps at the opportunity. Maybe the Brave Browser (Windows OS) user needs to not proceed, not startup Brave (and not have Brave be the default browser, and not have Brave set to start at machine startup), but simply restart their Windows OS machine before using Brave Browser.
In general, I would not leave Brave Browser (Windows OS) running. And henceforth, I would restart the Windows OS machine, before starting Brave Browser (Windows OS). Obviously, I am not any expert at this - just taking a precaution.
It’s interesting only because out of a handful computers I’ve only had this issue on one. And all my other computers are set to Manual by default. I’ve run SFC/DISM on the problem computer and it did make some repairs but didn’t solve my problem. Not sure why this computer is not triggering the service when needed but the others do it with no problem.
Also once I had Brave reconfigured, losing autofill and sync was never an issue after a restart until another Windows Update installed itself. So in my case something with the initial startup after a new update seems to fail to trigger the service as needed like it would normally do at any other time.
I think the primary problem most users will face with that, me included, is knowing to check if Brave is about to update itself before closing the last window, otherwise you won’t know if it just ran an update since it does so silently in the background (once the last Brave process is closed).
I am very curious though how such an issue made it through the Chromium source code, made it into even Microsoft’s own Edge, and not even they realized Chromium has an updater that seemingly isn’t using VaultSvc correctly by patiently waiting for it to launch.
What does strike me most interesting is I’d assume users with the problem simply have slow computers ala spinning rust vs SSD’s, but thus far when such users have posted their specs, that’s very much not true, they have excellent computers so there shouldn’t even be a delay anyway.
(Almost like a race condition, but seemingly with itself.)
My computer with the issue is the newest~10 months old. Asus Q423, Intel 226v, PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD, 16gb. So it falls into the latter category. I’ve had other odd issues with it - the CPU used to throttle itself at 0.40ghz when waking it after it had been fully charged. Deleting the pre-installed MyAsus app and replacing it with G-Helper resolved it. I also removed all the Windows AI/NPU features from the OS.
After completing this, I went back into Brave - went to a website and boom my autofill data was populating. I then grabbed my sync code from my desktop and added it to my laptop, the sync chain reconnected.
@289wk thanks for tagging. Will look over this. @grtych when this issue would happen, was it “resetting” all your Brave data, or just autofill data? Were your passwords/bookmarks/etc also still showing in the browser or were they gone as well?
